The Art of Surviving A Natural Disaster
Friday, April 14, 2006Video, photos and background information on The Gulf Coast: Road To Renewal
SUSIE GHARIB: New Orleans has always been known as a creative and vibrant city, with a lively music and arts scene. For many artists, Katrina posed huge challenges. For one of them, the storm provided opportunities for creativity.
THOMAS MANN, METAL ARTIST: "Storm Cycle" is kind of an emissary to the world to keep the story of New Orleans alive in the minds of America.
GHARIB: This is the "Storm Cycle" artist Thomas Mann is talking about, his post-Katrina exhibit now touring the country. These shadowboxes are crafted from debris Mann found on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina, debris that in some cases was once critical to some of its owners` most basic needs.
MANN: Having the power grid go down in the city, for any city is a significant loss of livability. I saw power lines down everyplace. I just started picking up materials. I got wire and I got insulators and I got all of this stuff that was just broken and laying around on the streets. There is actually a motion activation switch inside that box that will turn the lighting inside it on when you walk past it. That`s an important and I think powerful piece in the show.
GHARIB: Also powerful, these images we all remember, people being rescued from their roofs as the water rose.
MANN: I get chills thinking about this one. That piece was about the terrible dilemma that a number of New Orleanians faced as the water was rising in their homes and they had to climb into their attics. When they climbed in they saw what you see in that piece, which is the rafters and the nails penetrating through the plywood sheeting holding the shingles on the roof. And if they didn`t have a means to cut through that membrane to climb out on to the roof, they may well have been trapped in there by the water.
GHARIB: Mann says dealing with the disaster was emotionally challenging.
MANN: You can only take so much of it. You can only stand it for so long before there has to be some kind of relief.
GHARIB: This is his vision of that relief: art created from the most mundane of everyday items -- refrigerator magnets. They were gathered by another local artist from appliances discarded on the streets. He put them all over his car and people found that funny, a quirky slice of normalcy in an environment that`s far from normal.
MANN: We`re going to need a lot of help for a long time to be able to pull this back up again. And all of that just all of those things altogether just create this kind of emotional angst ridden daily cycle that just keeps you on the edge of your seat. And so the day is beautiful and you go to work and everything is fine. Then an hour later the insurance adjuster calls and the contractor says, "hey, can I come over and look at something?" Making "Storm Cycle" was actually a kind of release to be able to tell that story and send it out there and kind of talk about it.
